Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Since my last post was in January, I feel it's necessary to update you, my anonymous visitor, on what I've been doing for the past six months.

After completing my first year of law school at the University of Illinois in May, I moved to Washington, D.C. to intern for a federal judge for the summer. My experience in D.C. has been formative, rewarding, and productive - not only in terms of my legal career, but also in my work in game development.

I am pleased to announce that the game studio I co-founded with my long-time friend and collaborator DJ DeWitt - Yofupo - officially has a website and branding! As you'll notice, while DJ has designed a wonderful layout, there is currently a dearth of content. That will certainly change as quickly as our busy schedules permit.

While DJ has been finishing up work on Ping, I've been mocking a couple different game concepts, to be made in the future. The first concept is our novel iteration on the local-multiplayer arena brawler, inspired by 2013 Indie successes - Samurai Gunn and Towerfall. Since this game is still in the initial gameplay design process, I won't divulge the precise gameplay elements that make it unique just yet.

(Kampft! is German for 'Fight!' Thanks to my brother Sean for providing the German knowledge).

While the two mockups above are fairly representative of what an actual combat arena would look like, I thought I'd also share the very first mock I put together back in March (see below). Game art, like game design, I find, is a very iterative process. I'll often redo the art for a concept several times before I settle on a style and colors I like. It's rare, in my experience, to get it right the first time. To my mind, art is as much a process as it is a final product, so I wanted to share more of that process with you.

The next concept I've been working on is tentatively titled "Base One." Base One is an intimate, narrative-driven, mystery-exploration game. For the art style, I wanted to create an environment within the limitation of four colors per "area," with exceptions made for character sprites, dialogue references to characters, and specific objects. In the mockup below, other than the text "Sam" and the purple character, the mockup contains only four colors. The gameplay will be similarly stripped down to the bare essentials. This minimalist approach is inspired by games like Seiklus, Sword & Sworcery, and Journey.

Again, to show a bit of the process I went through in creating the final mockup above, see the very rough 'first draft' below.

Thanks for reading! I'll post again when I have more art and news to share!